Chantal Zabus Quotes & Sayings

The term "queer" is not simply a 1990s recoding of a pre-Stonewall epithet but here refers to a myriad forms of same-sex and other non-normative kinds of desire that have come to inform certain specific identity groups such as gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender individuals, transsexuals, transvestites, cross dressers, drag queens, drag kings, alternative straights and anyone in between. — Chantal Zabus

One miner at Robinson Deep Mines, Daniel, [...] claims that as an induna or "boss boy", he had sought the company of a "girlfriend", that is, a young Basotho man, because he was not authorized to go in town to "see women". However, when he got special permission to leave the mining complex, he recalls with barely suppressed emotion that, during such leaves, he would soon long to be reunited with his "boy-wife". He and his peers claimed that "[they] loved them better" and preferred them over the experienced (female) city streetwalkers. — Chantal Zabus

Stonewall" has come to mark the origins of gay political activism although earlier groups in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the French movement that grew out of the May 1968 events cannot be ignored. — Chantal Zabus

[Mark] Epprecht's larger thesis [...] is that Europeans introduced homophobia, not homosexuality, to Africa. — Chantal Zabus

In South Africa, "some women identify as gay rather than lesbian" and a "masculine man" playing the dominant role in a relationship with another man, for instance, is called "a straight man" and is not perceived as "gay" because he act as penetrator during sexual intercourse. This holds true to some extent in North Africa and in the Middle East. — Chantal Zabus

In pre-colonial Africa, men who had sexual relationship with older men almost always married a woman later in life and had children. Exclusive homosexuality would not have been and is still not a viable option for Africans who value wealth and patronymic extension through marriage. — Chantal Zabus

Some colonies were even reputed as being paradises of homosexual debauchery. Indeed, in French, faire passer son brevet colonial, that is, to take one's colonial certificate, mean initiating a young recruit to sodomy, that is, intercourse ,i per anum during which the noviciate would play the role of the insertee. — Chantal Zabus

African "homosexualities" can never be comfortably slotted within identity politics carved out of Western "gay" and "lesbian" liberation struggles, and display queer and even post-queer characteristics. — Chantal Zabus

Expressions to designate homosexuality exist in some fifty (Sub-Saharan) African languages - gor-jigeen in Wolof, ngochani in Shona, Hasini in Nandi, 'yan daudu in Hausa, mashoga ("passive" homosexual), mabasha ("virile" partner) in Kiswahili. [They refer] to ancestral practices in "traditional", that is pre-industrial, societies [...]. — Chantal Zabus

The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged. — Chantal Zabus

Out in Africa examines the anthropological, cultural and literary representations of male and female same sex desire, as it is at odds with an apparent context of heteronormativity and emphasis on reproduction, in a pan-African context, from the nineteenth century to the present. — Chantal Zabus

The US "Down Low" is thronging with young Black males who live double lives in the homosexual urban underground. These "Black" and "queer" young males, who have sex with men and live straight lives, reject "gays" as "faggots who dress, talk and act like girls", thereby ascribing a White effeminacy to gayness and embracing a Black hypermasculinity. — Chantal Zabus

As is often the case, an individual who has been racially oppressed may be blind that the same mechanisms of exclusion and denigration are at work in gender oppression. — Chantal Zabus